


PTSD

by timeheist



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 13:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/491311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeheist/pseuds/timeheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten takes Ianto as a companion during the aftermath of Canary Wharf. Some creative liberties taken with established canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	PTSD

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wake_The_Dragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wake_The_Dragon/gifts).



> Warnings: Potential triggers for PTSD, character death and suicide.

The Doctor saw him walking around outside the wreckage as though he was looking for somebody. He took one look at the Doctor, one look at a sheet of paper clasped so tightly in his hand, and stormed across what was left of the Wharf with a determined brokenness to his face. The Doctor was sold.

It wasn’t often he was sought out in the wake of disaster. Or to be more precise, when it was common knowledge amongst people with survivor’s guilt that he had been the cause of a disaster, or at least that was how he saw it, he was hardly sought out and asked for a lift. This Ianto Jones was a different matter entirely. He blamed the Doctor and he somehow thought that the Doctor had an obligation to everyone left alive. Eleven of them, because one girl, young, barely out of college, had already jumped in the Thames. She’d joined Torchwood with her fiancé, one of the first to be turned cyber. She hadn’t taken it well.

Neither had Ianto, at first. Wonderful Ianto, wonderful, brave, furious Ianto casting blame at the only powerful figure left alive in the building. It was easy to forget that the Doctor had been a prisoner, had lost somehow too, when you needed someone to blame. And everyone did. But the Doctor couldn’t take them all. Sometimes he wished that he could. In the end, he’d only taken Ianto, who had been ready to rip him a new one for not employing the rest of the survivors until he realised that the Doctor wasn’t employed by Torchwood at all and where he was being taken was very much not another branch of that dangerous, hated organisation. The Doctor liked Ianto at first sight and he was, for the most part, a good judge of character.

The Doctor had been forced to drag him from the body of his half-converted girlfriend, covering the man’s face as UNIT dealt with the mess and her included. Ianto had cried them; it had taken a week. The Doctor had taken him home after that, to the TARDIS, not to the halfway house he had kept in London since he’d been stranded in England in his third regeneration. The wonder of space and time travel, of sentient machines bigger on the inside, had not been enough to take away all of Ianto’s grief but it had been enough to focus him. And like so many others, the Doctor had taken his hand and kidnapped him away. UNIT – and Torchwood, eventually – wouldn’t notice just one more face missing from the roll call.

They kept an eye on the survivors, at Ianto’s insistence, and the manhunt for Ianto’s body, at the Doctor’s. The Doctor took him to Barcelona, trying to forget that he never did manage to take Rose there, trying to forget that he’d replaced her so quickly with Ianto and gotten on with his life once again. It hurt, of course it did, but he’d hurt so many people, and he deserved the pain. They didn’t. Sweet, wonderful Ianto, who carried around a stopwatch and delighted at everything during the day didn’t deserve to cry himself to sleep at night, all alone in the room the TARDIS had provided for him.

The night after they caught the pterodactyl the Doctor took Ianto to bed. It was the right time, he knew he wasn’t just telling him that. Ianto had smiled, an honest smile, so like Rose’s that it had broken the Doctor. His heart hadn’t been in pterodactyl hunting and he’d found himself watching Ianto’s every move as he tempted the lost creature – so like them both – down from the eaves of the church with a simple bar of chocolate. He watched Ianto’s every move for the rest of the day as though terrified he would break until Ianto noticed and confronted him over a mug of home-brewed coffee. By way of an answer, the Doctor had kissed him.

It became something of a tradition after that night. Every night, just to remind themselves that the wonders of the world weren’t there for a price everyone who hadn’t made it could afford, they fell into each other’s arms, both punishing and loving. The Doctor took care of all of Ianto’s wounds – physical, more often than not, from the awful lot of running they had to do – and Ianto took care of the Doctor, period, knowing that he too had lost a loved one and knowing that it wasn’t, for him, the first time. It took a few months but their affection became something more, an attraction, and one day, telling him that he loved him, the Doctor gave Ianto a key to the TARDIS and surrendered himself.

Ianto wasn’t Rose, and the Doctor wasn’t Lisa. But as they took comfort in each other they began to realise that it didn’t matter. They didn’t need to be. And they weren’t to blame for what had happened to the people they had last given their hearts to. The Doctor pressed a line of kisses down the side of Ianto’s neck and Ianto wrapped his legs around the Doctor’s back, pulling him closer and moaning deeply, wantonly. His stopwatch hung around his neck, digitally ticking away and the Doctor grinned, thinking about all the time they had together, how this time he’d be more careful, how he’d take Ianto to a clock shop one day and maybe they could fuck each other silly in the back.

He kissed the top of Ianto’s nose and wiped away the man’s tears, biting his lip and keeping up his gentle rhythm while Ianto kept talking to him, soothing and desperate and oh so – Gallifrey! The conversation and the teasing never lasted for long, and the focus turned to hurt and comfort, to losing themselves, to making love. The Doctor closed his eyes and Ianto held onto his back, shirt lapels still hanging around the man’s skinny back and Ianto’s tie bobbing between their slick, sweating bodies. The TARDIS hummed, lights down low in the Doctor’s – now shared – bedroom, and they both cried out as they came, slowing down and falling into each other’s embraces of newly administered care.


End file.
